In this episode of Truth About FX, Walter touch on the topic of trading and socialization, trading tribes, and why it is important to have a balanced and healthy life outside of trading. He delves into the advantages of finding the right persons to hang-out with and the unusual but otherwise helpful things we can get from experienced people.
Download (Duration: 05:36 / 6.41 MB)
In This Episode:
00:32 – meetup groups
01:34 – Trading Tribe
02:39 – “cool” traders
03:21 – a balanced life
04:05 – wrong group
05:22 – retired friends
Tweetables:
Trading can be a lonely existence. [Click To Tweet].
Hang-out with people outside of trading. [Click To Tweet].
Be with people who can teach you more. [Click To Tweet].
Hugh: Hi, Walter! What is the best way to hang out with other traders if you don’t have traders in your local area?
Walter: That is a good one. If you go on to the internet, I don’t know if you’ve seen the Meetup Groups, Hugh. Have you seen those on the internet before?
Hugh: Yeah. Those were great.
Walter: Yeah. I think you can find a group for just about anything. I’ve actually even gone to a few of those meetup groups to give some presentations on how I trade to some of those forex traders because it’s fun to me and to other traders and things like that.
The other thing I would suggest, if you are into your psychology, you might look into the Trading Tribe. You can go to Ed Seykota’s website which we’ll link up in the shownotes to this podcast.
Basically, it is a group where you meet up with other traders and you work through your issues. You are not meant to go there and talk about trading, but what you are meant to do is go to there and figure out what are the emotional barriers in your life.
If you can purge those emotions, then the theory is your trading will get better. You will not play out these little dramas in your trading and you are, sort of like, you get them out of your system right at Trading Tribe.
That is another group and sometimes what will happen in Trading Tribe is some of the traders will go get together outside the Trading Tribe. Trading Tribe is really not meant to be chit-chat about trading. It’s really a specific routine.
There are Trading Tribes around the world. There’s probably one near you and you can go to Ed Seykota’s website and forum there. I would just say go to the meetup groups, you may go to a conference or something, but I don’t know if those things are really… I really do not go to those.
I think they are broker dominated and I guess there’s traders there, I do not know. I guess, there’s traders there because the broker is trying to sell you stuff. I don’t know, Hugh. What would you say?
Hugh: Yeah, I totally agree with you. I would also, maybe take a step back and say “do you want to hangout with other traders?” I’ve interviewed a couple who — they’re professional traders but — they do not want to hangout with other traders.
I don’t know, maybe they don’t like them or they do not want them to influence their trading or their thought process or whatever. Or they just haven’t found anyone who were “cool” so that might be something to think about, too.
If you hang out with other traders, sometimes it can have a negative influence just as much as hanging out with “cool” traders can have positive influence. That is something to think about, too.
Walter: Yeah. Anyone who is listening to this, who’s been to the online forums, knows that that’s one of the things that happens. I mean, we’ve all seen it happen. You get in this online forum, you can get sucked on a rabbit hole with this back-and-forth “he-said-she-said”, “his-works-this-doesn’t-work” and all that stuff.
I think that’s a fair point. Do you really want to hangout with them? Because in the end, trading can be a lonely existence. It can be boring because you do the same thing over and over again.
It is not really something for someone who really needs a creative outlet. I think it’s good to have a balanced life. Maybe, as Hugh suggests, you should really just hangout with people that have other interest outside of trading.
I know it’s really tempting to want to hangout with other traders, that’s something that really happens early on in your trading thing. In your development as a trader, when you want to eat, breathe and drink trading, you want to see other traders and read trading books and go to forums and conferences and all that.
I think you are onto something. You really need to rethink that. Maybe you have other likes in the photography, so you hangout with other photographers when you are not trading. Maybe you’re into surfing or skydiving or making ceramics or whatever, learning another language.
Maybe that is what you should put effort into instead of traders. Like you say, if you are on the wrong group of traders, that can really sap your energy and get you really down especially if it is a group of trader who aren’t doing very well. I agree, I think that is a great advice and I appreciate it.
Hugh: I think you mentioned once you hang out with a lot of retired surfers or something. Right?
Walter: Yeah. They are like my mentors because they’ve been around and stuff and those are the guys that I like to hangout with. I like to have lunch with these 60’s, 70 year old guys because they take you under their wing and teach you about things that they’ve learned before.
They’ve had interesting lives and you can learn historically like, I’ll ask them about the market. What was it like in the 70’s when there’s hyperinflation? What was it like when the… You know what I mean?
There’s a lot of great stories there about these guys who have built fortunes and lost them and built them up again. It’s like having Donald Trump as a friend or something. It’s really cool. I am not saying that I’ll hunt down Donald Trump’s friends, I am just saying it’s kind of what it’s like having this wisdom. That’s another thing. That is a great point.
If you want to learn, maybe start and go to a different crowd, go to some people who have a few more decades under their belt and they can to teach you more. That’s what I found. That is a good point because my retired friends are definitely like mentors to me. They help me out a lot in a lot of things.
Hugh: That’s awesome. Thanks for sharing that.
Walter: See you.
Shownotes: http://www.seykota.com/tt/directory/default.html
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